Science Studies Courses, Spring 2012
Phil 77300 [CRN 17632]
The Evolution of Meaning
Prof. Godfrey-Smith
4 credits
GC: Tues. 2:00 – 4:00
Room TBD
The course will look at recent work on the evolution of communication systems, both between and within organisms. How does this work bear on the attempt to give a naturalistic account of semantic properties, and other projects in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind? Readings will include work by Lewis, Skyrms, Millikan, Gallistel, Shea, Harms and others.
ANTH 71600 [CRN 17764]
Anthropology of Science
Professor Eben Kirksey
GC: TH, 4:15 – 6:15
3 credits
Rm TBD
This course will offer an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Science Studies through the lens of anthropology. Starting with Laboratory Life, the classic 1979 study of the Salk Institute by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, we will dwell on how ethnographic insights informed the development of actor network theory. Working our way through the 1980s, we will explore texts by feminist critics of science and society about strong objectivity, coproduction, boundary objects, and cyborg articulations. Departing from the 1996 “Sokal Hoax” in the journal Social Text, we will unravel the controversies of “The Science Wars” a vigorous debate that was, in the words of Joan Fujimura, “not about science versus antiscience, not about objectivity versus subjectivity, but about authority in science: What kind of science should be practiced, and who gets to define it?” If the tenor of these “wars” was openly hostile, more recent scholarship in science studies has taken a playful turn. The multispecies zeitgeist, sweeping the humanities and social sciences, has led some ethnographers to become “poachers.” Encroaching on the domain of biology, anthropologists have begun to steal organisms-like honeybees, tentacular cup corals, and avian influenza viruses-as well as “scientific methods”, claiming them for their own.
WSCP 81601 [CRN 17847]
Topics in Women’s and Gender Studies: BioFeminisms: Science, Matter, Agency
Professor Victoria Pitts-Taylor
GC: Th 11:45-1:45
3 credits
Rm TBD
This course rethinks feminist and queer theory’s relationship to the body and biological matter in light of new considerations of ontology in science studies, cultural studies, and feminist thought. We will read contemporary treatments of science, of Darwin and evolutionary theory, of neurobiology and epigenetics, and other fields and disciplines that consider biological matter, and think about them in feminist and queer frameworks. Readings will include feminist scholars Elizabeth Grosz, Vicki Kirby, Linda Birke, Hannah Landecker, Karen Barad, and Isabelle Stengers. We will read these ‘new materialists’ alongside other works on the ‘new biology’ and the ‘new sciences’ that challenge traditional boundaries of the body and self, conventional ideas of agency, and dualisms of mind/body.
ENGL 80200 [CRN 17353]
Aestheticizing Science: The Cross-Fertilization of Contemporary Science and Literary Narrative
Professor Gerhard Joseph
Mondays 11:45AM-1:45PM
2 OR 4 credits
Rm TBD
“The universe,” says Muriel Rukeyser debatably enough, “is made of stories [and poems], not of atoms.” Beginning with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, George Levine’s “The Narrative of Scientific Epistemology,” and the “Sokal Hoax” (and the responses of the scientific and humanistic communities to the last in The Sokal Hoax—U. of Nebraska Press), we, as in large measure “techno-illiterate humanists” (Powers, Galatea 2.2, 314), will then consider—in our amateurish fashion, to be sure, and as applicable—scientific methodology (Allegra Goodman, Instinct) thermodynamics, chemistry and ballistics (Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy” and Gravity’s Rainbow), the history of mathematics and demographics (Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star), quantum theory (Michael Frayn, Copenhagen), entymology and evolutionary biology (E. O. Wilson, The Ant Hill), climatology (Ian McEwan, Solar), artificial intelligence (Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2), cognitive theory and neuroscience (Richard Powers, The Echo Maker), autism (Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), science and feminism (Donna Haraway, (Modest Witness), and genetic modification (Octavia Butler, the Xenogenesis trilogy, especially Dawn). Our larger purpose, implicit in the grammatical pun within “aestheticizing science,” is to show how simultaneously science, at its cutting edges, tends to aestheticize the world (as in, say, Brian Greene’s elegant book on superstring theory, The Elegant Universe), and contemporary writers of fictions support their purchase on the Lacanian “real” by metaphorizing contemporary science/technology within their work. As they do so, they move us now in the direction of aesthetic wonder, now in that of abject terror (hence, the emergent genre of the posthuman sublime).
Course requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
